Tag Archives: corruption

I enjoyed the hell out of covering his misdeeds in 2005. I hope he can provide the world with more fodder for hilarious tales of corruption in the years ahead. Given his lack of contrition (he regrets pleading guilty!), I think that’s likely. →

There’s really nothing to debate here—Hamilton is clearly, totally in the wrong—which is precisely why Republicans feel so comfortable throwing him to the wolves.

(Incidentally, there’s no evidence right now that there’s anything about Hamilton’s behavior that indicates that his party membership has anything to do with it. There’s no reason to suspect that he collaborated with other Republicans on this, that there was a cover-up, and this is not a practice that is consistent with conservatism. Though I must confess there’s a certain amount of schadenfreude found in a supposed small-government Republican expanding government to employ himself.)

What’s interesting about this is that it shines a light on a long-standing problem of the General Assembly: we don’t pay legislators nearly enough for the work that we expect of them.

Phil Hamilton is going to lose his seat—and maybe worse—over a $40,000/year part-time job. We’re not talking about millions. Or a meaningful fraction of a million dollars. This is the sort of salary somebody can pull down managing a department of Sears. Why would Hamilton risk so much for so little money?

The answer to that is probably pretty simple: he has bills to pay, just like the rest of us. Though unlike you and me, he’s a member of the legislature, meaning that he has a job that occupies at least half of his time. And not half of his time in a convenient way, like Monday through Friday, 8 AM through noon, or two ten-hour shifts on the weekends. No, he’s got to head to Richmond and do nothing but legislatin’ for a couple of months every year. There’s a district office to run, fundraisers to hold, public meetings to attend, constituent service to provide, and the thousand small duties of the office. Then there’s the campaigning, which in a competitive race can easily eat up most of the day for a few months prior to the election. And how much do we pay legislators for performing this duty that is the centerpiece of their lives?

$17,640. That’s the annual salary for members of the House of Delegates. By my math, that’s something like twelve bucks an hour. I know people who make better money assembling sandwiches at Bodo’s.

Why do we pay them so badly? Because it allows us to maintain a happy fiction, the fiction that we have a part-time legislature with gentlemen legislators who represent the people because they are the people, who come together for a few weeks every year to do the state’s business, and then return to tilling their soil or making candles or selling slaves or whatever. This allows us to avoid a host of ethical problems, or at least pretend that we’re avoiding ethical problems. Put a banker on the banking committee that passes laws to regulate banks? No problem! Who knows banking better? A DUI attorney who introduces bills to toughen drunk driving laws, which benefits his business? That’s A-OK—because he’s obviously the man for the job.

We’re supposed to be shocked—shocked!—that Phil Hamilton, who works for the Newport News public schools, has introduced legislation that directly benefits him. If he were an attorney, that wouldn’t just be fine, it would be encouraged. But he’s not. So Hamilton is in deep shit.

Generally speaking, for a legislator to live within the minimal ethical boundaries established by the General Assembly, he must be a) an attorney b) independently wealthy or c) poor. Hamilton clearly had grown tired of option C, and figured that the state owed him for all of the time he’d put in for the public good. Had Hamilton done the correct thing and retired from his seat to earn some more money, he would have been in good company. I’ve never made a study of it, but it seems to me that a great many members of the legislature have stepped down because they simply couldn’t afford it anymore. The exception to that being attorneys.

Did you know that both Sen. Creigh Deeds and Bob McDonnell “work” for law firms right now? Obviously they’re not putting in a lot of office hours, but they’re drawing a salary. Any member of the legislature who is an attorney is free to do just that. You can get paid for doing nothing…as long as you’re a lawyer.

This should be a call to action for Virginia. We get the quality of government that we’re willing to pay for. At $17k, we’re going to get the idle rich, dilettantes, lawyers, and a handful of selfless, civic-minded individuals…and some of the latter group will not remain so selfless, winding up like Hamilton. We need to increase legislators’ salaries tenfold and bar outside employment. If you want to be in the legislature, you’ve got to go all-in. Then we can increase the length of the session to something humane, something that allows bills to get a proper airing—12 weeks, 16 weeks, maybe 20 weeks, spread out throughout the year, in the manner of Congress. Or we can keep doing what we’re doing. But from where I’m sitting, that’s not working out so well.

What Phil Hamilton did is wrong. He should lose his seat. He should lose his job. He should be shamed by his community. But let’s not pretend that he’s an anomaly. Hamilton just picked the wrong profession.

The good folks at the Sunlight Foundation have been studying the correlation between campaign contributions and congressional earmarks, and in doing so they caught Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-IN) red-handed getting earmarks for major donors. Is it legal? Assuming that there was no bribe menu, probably. But it’s almost certainly not right. This is a great example of the value of data mining and how the unglamorous task of pawing through government data can yield great results—precisely the sort of thing that newspapers don’t have the budgets for and most bloggers are too lazy to do. (Via Boing Boing)

It’s tough to find a silver lining in the DOJ’s decision to drop all charges against convicted bribe-receiver Ted Stevens. Stevens is quite clearly guilty of receiving bribes and, as a U.S. Senator, I think he’s deserving of severe punishment. Public officials who breach the public trust must be made an example of. But the government prosecutors are likewise clearly guilty of withholding evidence that showed that Stevens’ crimes were not nearly as severe as claimed. Prosecutorial misconduct is also deserving of severe punishment, and the appropriate response is to throw out any convictions—fruit of the poisonous tree, after all—and perhaps drop the charges, as well.

Stevens will now escape punishment, and reasonably enough. Whatever his crimes were, they’re trumped by the government’s abuse of its own laws. There’s not much satisfaction to be found in seeing the punishers punished, while the criminal goes free. But if the DoJ’s only Public Integrity lacks integrity itself, that may well be a more serious problem than a senator who’s a bit short on it himself.

So we’ll get our criminal justice system fixed. Then we’ll move on to the senators.

Blagojevich is a Democrat, the first Democrat to head Illinois in thirty years. You might remember Republican George Ryan, his predecessor, who is currently living in a prison camp in Indiana, having been convicted on federal corruption charges. Oh, and for erudite points in conversation today: it’s pronounced bluh-GOY-uh-vich.

Corrupt Louisiana congressman William Jefferson has been tossed out on his ass by the voters. Rep. Jefferson is best known for the $90,000 that the feds found in his freezer; Jefferson denied that it was bribe money, apparently thinking people would believe that he just keeps enormous amounts of money in his icebox. The district is only 11% Republican, but that didn’t stop the nine term Democrat from getting the hook. The pathetic thing is that they reelected him in 2006. At least they got the message eventually.